a year since I’ve posted here…

It’s been over a year since I posted to this blog. oops!

I raised some questions about the economics of social media in an earlier post — in particular, I wondered about the business model for sites like Delicious.com and Twitter. Well, things have become somewhat clearer in the intervening year — it looks like there is no business model for Delicious. bummer.

The community’s reaction to the announcement that Delicious would no longer be supported by Yahoo! (or maybe not) was immediate: within a day of the first tweets, there were blog postings, tweets, and even a publicly editable Google doc sharing information on just how those of us with Delicious links might move forward (in addition to the very helpful personal emails from Dana at OIT – thanks, Dana!).

At this point, I’ve imported all of my Delicious bookmarks into Pinboard (http://pinboard.in/u:frieda.mendelsohn/). Pinboard has an interesting business model which appeals to me as an economist who teaches network effects: as the size of the network grows (and, therefore, the value of the network to each user grows), the fee to join increases! “The fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay. ” [http://pinboard.in/help/fee/ ]

Even better, I can connect my Pinboard account with my Twitter account so that any tweet I “star” (or “favorite” – that’s really not a verb, is it?) is automagically added to my Pinboard list of unread bookmarks. Of course, as always, I’m way behind in reading and annotating the resulting bookmarks. Still, if you’re interested in what I’ve been reading (or at least stacking up for reading!), my bookmarks can now be found at http://pinboard.in/u:frieda.mendelsohn/.